Frequently asked questions

It’s £40 per year if you’re working, or £20 per year if you’re unwaged.

No. However, if there’s something ‘Yorkshirey’ about you, so much the better! Born in Yorkshire. Yorkshire ancestry. Married to someone from Yorkshire. Owner of a Yorkshire Terrier. You get the gist. Seriously, though, we really don’t discriminate; you can be a member and participate in our online workshops from anywhere in the world. But it does help if you live in Yorkshire, though, because then you can participate in our face-to-face events.

Access to all our free online and in-person workshops throughout the year. They're led by professional writers and cover a variety of scriptwriting topics (we usually hold around 6 per year, sometimes more). Access to our online SYchat group and Yorkshire city writers' sub-groups where members share their news, ask for advice, find out what’s happening, and more. Access to our members-only playbacks page, where you can listen to recordings of Q&A sessions we've held with professional writers and producers. Our monthly Newscript e-newsletter, delivered directly to your inbox, containing industry news, competitions and calls for submissions and news from our members. Opportunities to submit your work for our Page to Stage event and our annual radio drama competition. If your piece is selected for Page to Stage, you’ll see it up on its feet in a theatre space in front of a live audience and get feedback from a panel of professionals. Win the radio drama competition and we'll produce your piece for broadcast on Chapel FM and publishing on our website. You'll be be able to network with other writers, to buddy each other and keep in the loop with all things scriptwriting in our county and beyond.

Of course! You can join any time; your membership will last for 12 months from the date you join.

No. Our writing community is spread across the whole of Yorkshire, so that would be a lot of discounts for our volunteer management team to negotiate and manage! But we believe our members get a lot for their money; our membership fees haven't increased in over 10 years.

No, sorry. But you can get a flavour of what we're all about by attending one of our twice-yearly Page to Stage events, which are open to anyone and tickets are around £5. We usually hold these at Seven Arts in Chapel Allerton, Leeds. There’s a bar area where people mingle before and after the show, so you could chat to people there if you like. You can also have a read of our reviews page to see what our writers say about being a member. We deliberately keep our annual membership fees at an affordable level, so even if you joined and only attended one of our 4-hour workshops, you’d still get your money’s worth.

This will have happened because the bank card details you paid your membership fee with are out of date. When your annual membership renewal date rolls around, our system is set up to to collect your subs automatically. If your payment fails, the system sends another email to notify you and there is then a two-week grace period in which you can update your payment card details. If you don't update your payment card details within the two weeks, the system will automatically cancel your membership. You'll need to log into your Script Yorkshire account, update your payment details and purchase a new subscription. If you didn't receive any notifications, they will either have gone to your junk mail folder, or your anti-virus software or firewall blocked them, and that's not something we can do anything about at our end, unfortunately.

Script Yorkshire is run by a small team of volunteers. It’s not part of our remit to give advice to individual writers. However, you’ll always get loads of great advice from the professional writers who are kind enough to run workshops for us. And we often have Q&A sessions with a panel of professionals as part of our AGM.

Yes and no. We don’t offer a ‘scriptwriting for beginners’ course per se, but every year we programme some juicy ‘nuts and bolts of scriptwriting’ workshops which are ideal for new writers. Check out our workshops page to see what’s in the pipeline. Alternatives? City Lit offers a few short online courses at a really reasonable price. Or you could take a look at the online screenwriting courses on Skillshare as a starting point. There are also loads of good books. Here’s a little list for you: • Into The Woods by John Yorke • Screenplay by Syd Field • Writing for TV and Radio by Sue Teddern and Nick Warburton • Write a Theatre Script in 25 Days (& 10 hours) by Tony Craze • Playwriting: The Structure of Action by Sam Smiley • Playwriting Seminars 2.0 by Richard Toscan • So You Want to Write Radio Drama by Claire Grove & Stephen Wyatt • Story by Robert McKee • The Secret Life of Plays by Steve Waters • Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg (about writing in general) • Playwriting: A Practical Guide by Noel Greig • Spoonface Steinberg by Lee Hall That should be enough to get you going!

Not if it’s a full-length script. But, if you’re a member, you will be able to submit short scripts, or a section of a script, for our Page to Stage events and radio drama competition. If your work is selected for performance, you'll get feedback from a panel of professional writers. Even if yours isn't in the final selection, we aim to give brief written feedback on all scripts submitted.

Not directly. But we do schedule adaptation workshops from time to time that will give you guidance on how to go about it. Keep an eye on our workshops page.

Yes, they do! Our members write all sorts: poetry, novels, you name it. So you’ll be in good company as a member of Script Yorkshire. We have actors and directors who join too, but in terms of what we offer as an organisation, it’s all about scriptwriting.

Possibly. No guarantees. As a member, you’ll be able to post a call-out for collaborators on SYchat and see if anyone responds. It would be up to you, though, to organise and navigate this yourself; our volunteer committee members don’t get involved.

No.

Unfortunately not. Our organisation is mainly geared up towards helping writers with their craft, giving them opportunities to see or hear their work 'off the page', and to network with their fellow scriptwriters.

Our workshop team programmes a wide range of workshops every year. We always try to cover the fundamentals of scriptwriting, along with writing for different media, e.g. stage, screen or airwaves, and different genres, e.g. comedy, horror etc. We also encourage members to tell us what kind of workshops they need.

Yes. Our workshops are strictly members-only.

Aw, that’s a shame. We don’t record our face-to-face workshops. But we DO sometimes record our online workshops and share the replay links on SYchat after the event. They’re only available for a short time and are strictly for paid-up members. We also have a new audio library where we have started to stash recordings from our online Q&A sessions with industry insiders.

As well as our main SYchat group, we also have online sub-groups for all the Yorkshire cities: Bradford, Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, Wakefield and York. You can join your nearest, or whichever ones you fancy, to see if any of your scriptwriting neighbours would like to join you on a regular basis for sociable sharing of scripty goodness. Or just to have coffee and talk shop. Our members in York have always had a very active local scene. Check out their Script Factor page on our website to get a better idea of what they do.

It’s an online group where subscribed members can share their news, ask for advice, and keep themselves in the loop. You can opt out, obviously, but it’s the main way we communicate with our members, and members with one another.

No. We’re all about writing. They’re all about film. We’re both all about Yorkshire, though.